(a) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a system and method for providing content-centric services using an ultra-peer.
(b) Description of the Related Art
With the growing number of smartphone users in the mobile communications market, wireless data traffic has been increasing exponentially. Moreover, as the smartphones' performance shows improvement, a wide variety of application services have been introduced. Especially, the demand for large volumes of multimedia traffic is increasing. That is, the increasing spread of smartphones will observe the installation of a wide variety of applications installed on smartphones, and therefore P2P clients are expected to increase.
However, the current common P2P technology has the problem that it is difficult to apply wired P2P as it is to a wireless network because terminals in the wireless network show low performance due to large performance deviation, unlike terminals in a wired network. Moreover, it is impossible to apply the wired P2P to a wireless network since the terminal status changes often, the wireless network incurs high cost, and the transfer rate is low and unstable compared to the wired network.
Accordingly, P2P of a wireless network introduces the concept of a super peer functioning in place of a mobile peer in order to overcome the aforementioned problems. Nevertheless, the super peer is only used as a mere substrate for the mobile peer.
In general, content transmission includes a broadcast technique for transmitting content to all recipients, a multicast technique for transmitting content to specific recipients who subscribed to a service, and a unitcast technique for transmitting content selectively to each recipient. Among them, the broadcast technique uses a single predetermined address, while the multicast technique uses an IP address for each group.
By the way, such an address is not specific for content, but used to differentiate recipients. Moreover, an IP address used for unicast is a host IP of a recipient, which is routed to a destination. Hence, an IP address does not represent content, and therefore inefficient in such environments as smart TVs targeted for content transmission.
That is, the same data is transmitted to different IP addresses, so the load on a server due to redundant transmissions may increase. Further, the amount of traffic on a network may increase because of redundant content transmissions.
The above information disclosed in this Background section is only for enhancement of understanding of the background of the invention and therefore it may contain information that does not form the prior art that is already known in this country to a person of ordinary skill in the art.